Jesus, when people actually have to work for something, they end up with a Sequoa up their ass. If you don’t want time sinks then play something else. Don’t come to a game and gut the economy.

one word…die

I LOLerblade at the latter group!

At game industry conferences, I always hear about how new design structures will change, alleviate or eliminate the major problems caused to players by the RMT market, but I haven’t really seen that happening yet.

Erh, nice philosophy. Drive away the people willing to spend more money on the game that might go towards developing more content for you.

I think you’re actually trying to critique Blizzard/Mythic/Sony/etc. here, which was not my point at all. Maybe it is actually better, economically speaking, for MMO companies to allow gold farmers.

But, for whatever reason, most don’t. So when you say “I will not do X” and then turn around and do X, you still broke your agreement, even if you think you’re doing the other person a favor.

I’ll give you some credit though. “Baby, I lied to you for your own good” is a creative excuse.

What really pisses me off is when a game says up front that they do not allow it — WoW, for instance — then takes no substantive measures to stop it. That’s when I start feeling really cheated. It’s like going to a M:tG tournament that announced ahead of time “no proxies” and then having my opponent fill the table with random lands labelled “Black Lotus”, “Mox Emerald”, etc., while I struggle to compete with the cards I actually own, and the tournament organizers don’t do jack.

You think people don’t quit games because of it? The gold farmers are not the only reason I quit WoW, but they’re one of the major issues. I’d still be playing if Blizzard had kept their promise to me that RMT would not be taking place.

The rules of the game are the rules of the game. If you don’t like the rules, don’t play the goddamn game. Don’t give me this “I’m paying to have fun, so I should be able to break any rules I don’t think are fun.” That’s not how games work. Not ones that other people want to continue playing, anyway.

I really, really suck at FPS games. I love them, but I just don’t have the reflexes. Too old and too slow. So … should I be allowed to use an aimbot? After all, I bought the game, right? I should be able to have fun however I want. Just like the people with no time to play a MMORPG to reach the goals they want, I don’t have the physical ability to play a FPS to reach the goals I want. So, TPRJones, would it be okay with you if I showed up on your favorite CS server with every cheat and hack known to gamerkind? You don’t care what I’m doing behind closed doors, right?

I worked out some very rough numbers for WoW. Assuming a “normal” WoW player account is actively killing/looting for 3 hours a day, every day (the rest of their online time being spent LFG, playing in BGs, helping guildies with quests, more LFG, crafting, waiting for the rest of the raid group to show up, random ganking in STV, looking at stuff on the AH, etc.) that’s 21 hours a week spent adding gold and items to the economy. And I’m probably being generous here — I know an awful lot of my own WoW time was spent on non-profitable things. A commercial gold farmer’s account, on the other hand, is generally played by multiple people. The ones I tracked for a month or so were literally online 24/7. Assuming that 3 hours out of those 24 (1 hour per shift) are spent on end-of-shift matters like mailing loot to the sales mules, trading seats, etc., that is 147 hours a week spent generating gold and items. Even if they’re grinding in the exact same places, one account used by a commercial gold farming company has 7x the economic impact on the game as an account played by a legitimate player. And, of course, they’re not grinding in the exact same places. The gold farmers have characters optimized for farming, not fun, so they farm more effectively than everyone else, and they know the most profitable places in the game, and spend all day, every day, there. So, taking these factors into consideration, in terms of total economic impact, a gold-farmer is probably equal to a lot more legitimate players than even the raw numbers suggest. If they’re just 50% more effective, that would bring them to a bit over 10x the economic weight of one real player. I’ll round down. Further, not all of the players on any given server are doing any serious grinding at all. Many of them make it to 60 and maybe go on a raid once or twice a week and spend most of time PvPing, hanging around talking, whatever. Plus, people grinding to 60 have only a limited impact because they’re focusing on the best exp, which is rarely in the same places as the best loot, especially where quests are involved, so they’re barely in the equation at all. (whether it’s their main or an alt doesn’t matter; they’re putting their allocation of playtime into levelling, not farming) So let’s cut our 21 player-hours of gold grinding per week in half, to account for all the people who are doing something else, like PvPing, levelling, or goofing off.

Based on those numbers, one commercial gold farmer has 20x the economic impact of a legitimate player. If just 5% of the active accounts are owned by commercial gold farming operations, that 5% outweighs the entire population of legitimate players. They’re the tail that not just wags the dog, but can pick it up and swing it around in the air.

Obviously I’ve pulled a lot of these numbers out of a dark and smelly place — I don’t have access to Blizzard’s metrics. But I’m fairly confident that I’m in the right ballpark. It might be 15x or 30x instead of 20x, but it’s up there somewhere.

I am, or was, rather rich in WoW. Probably one of the richest people on my server who had not bought gold. I am very, very good at making money. One of the reasons for this is I pay very close attention to the auction house — not just prices but trends, items, who’s selling what, etc. (I’m not entirely without economic impact myself; at my peak, 1.5%-2% of all the auctions on my faction’s AH were mine) Certain names … names known to be commercial gold farmers’ item sales mules … were always very prominent there. I would estimate that at least 75% of the purple items, and an unknown but very large percentage of the blues, were sold by those known gold farmers. So if anything my estimates are actually on the low side. And those farmers are in collusion on prices, too. It’s not in any of their best interests to get in price wars with each other; they have set prices and keep them high. If someone undercuts them substantially, they buy the item and re-sell it at their price.

They keep prices high, so more and more people buy gold from them in order to afford that gear. Then much of that gold goes right back to the RMT companies again when their customers buy their items on the AH, and gets sold again, over and over.

You ask how commercial gold farming is different from someone twinking a friend, or a guild helping out its members? Quite simply because nobody, no matter how good a friend they are, spends 147 hours a week farming in the most profitable spots possible to twink a friend. Most people don’t bother doing serious gold farming at all except for things like mount money, and they stop once they’ve got that mount. (and the money is out of the economy) The money and items that go to the twinkie or the guild are those acquired in the normal course of gameplay. The game is designed to accomodate such transfers of wealth between players — the actual farming activity is minimal, and has little overall effect, and it is more than outweighed by the social benefits of friendships among players and mutual support among guildies, both of which serve to make the game more enjoyable for players and keep them playing longer.

There are two reasons why companies aren’t readily going to move into sanctioned RMT.

One of them is simple: Players don’t want other people buying gold and gear. People cheat to get an edge over other players. If everyone is doing it, then there’s no edge. Players choose games where their particular skills and attributes will give them an edge. For instance, someone with good reflexes plays FPS games; someone who is good at planning grand strategies is likely to play 4X games; someone who has uber leadership skills is likely to be running a major guild in a MMORPG. In the case of cheaters, it’s their willingness to break the rules, to violate not only the EULA they agreed to but the social contract (“no cheatin’!) among the players, that gives them an edge. If the rules allow everyone to do what the cheaters have been doing, they have no edge. So, most people who want to cheat will not be found playing on a RMT-permitted server. Think about it: how many players would a CS server that advertised that all bots, all hacks, all cheats, were permitted have? Some might stop by to try it out, but they wouldn’t play there.

The other one is legal. This is the can of worms that Sony has opened, and is going to regret one of these days. If RMT is sanctioned — especially handled through the company itself — that creates a presumption of ownership of virtual property. Even if you and I might be persuaded otherwise, Juror Joe Sixpack isn’t going to be. “This young feller done paid a hundred bucks for a magic sword, seems to me that he owns hisself a sword.” So what’s the company’s liability when something happens to that sword? What if it breaks? What if it gets nerfed? What if a better sword comes out and nobody wants the old one anymore? (people sued GM when they started making Cadillac convertibles again because the ones they’d bought 20 years ago weren’t the last Cadillac convertibles any more) Do we really want to play games where the legal department has to approve any game balance decisions so the devs don’t get sued by whining paladins? Or what about when something happens to the whole game? Look at the roar of anger from SWG players who bought the new expansion just before the entire game was gutted and rebuilt into something different . What if they’d bought a few hundred dollars worth of gear for their characters that was now useless? What if they’d done it in AC2 just before the shutdown was announced? “Seems ya sold him a magic sword, and now he ain’t gonna be able ta use that sword, so seems ya owe him his money back.” That’s a can of very squirmy worms, and those worms have teeth.

You think I’m imagining this? It’s already happening in foreign markets; it’s only a matter of time before it happens here. Thanks, Sony.

All legal and economic aspects aside, though, the bottom line is this: You agree to the rules of the game when you play it. Saying “I don’t like the rules, so I’m not going to obey them” is cheating. If you don’t like the rules, go play a different game with rules you like. Cheaters are scum. I don’t want to play games with cheaters. Not Monopoly, not CounterStrike, not World of Warcraft. When other people are cheating to win, leaving me unable to compete, I have two choices: cheat too, or quit. And I won’t cheat.

Does anyone happen to have any figures on how popular Sony’s Station Exchange servers are? And how much RMT continues to go on on the normal servers?